You might not know it, but the phrase “Merry Christmas” is getting more popular, and it completely dwarfs the use of “Happy Holidays” — at least by one measure.

Your Digits blogger has been playing with Google’s Books Ngram Viewer, a tool released last week that lets you search the tech giant’s database of words from more than 5 million books. According to these books, the phrase “Merry Christmas” is a far more important part of our literary culture than “Happy Holidays.” By a large margin. We’re talking 17-to-1, here.

And authors have been writing “Merry Christmas” more of late. In 2008, the latest year for which Google has data — and coincidentally the year in which the Journal’s opinion writers proclaimed that Christmas had lost the “war on Christmas” — the phrase was used more than ever.

True, the usage of “Happy Holidays” has seen a much larger proportional jump than that of “Merry Christmas,” rising about 200% from the late ’90s through the early ’00s. But it’s still a blip compared with the Christmas juggernaut.

Strangely, “Merry Christmas” had seen a decline in literature from about 1940 to 1960, when it began a steady upswing. And one other interesting tidbit: Apparently, we started capitalizing the “merry” just after 1900. Google’s tool is case-sensitive, and “merry Christmas” was more popular than “Merry Christmas” until then.

OK, OK, we know that the use of phrases in books might not be a reliable proxy for their use in speech or elsewhere. And scholars of literature and the humanities have pointed out the myriad problems with Google’s tool. It doesn’t account for the many different genres of books, nor does it tell you about the context in which the phrase was written. Maybe all these authors are actually writing stuff like, “Boy, I hate it when people say ‘Merry Christmas.’” Maybe they’re lamenting the fact that nobody says “Merry Christmas” anymore — oh the irony. We don’t know.

But the criticisms miss the point. Google’s Ngram Viewer is giving us a glimpse into our culture that previously was out of reach for most people. It’s one of an increasing number of data tools that are making information more accessible for the public. (See our colleague Zach Seward’s post from earlier this week for more on this.) These tools might be flawed, but they’re bound to improve. Consider it your Christmas present from the world of data.

And if you need one more gift to make you smile, here’s proof that Rudolph really is the most famous reindeer of all.